TECHiE TALKS

You just bought a shiny laptop for office and home you use or on business trips and vacation or go to down town and drop by on a wifi zone.  Then that would be a very big productivity you have there.  But how would you take good care of the only thing that is so handy and so useful for you.  Do you think cleaning it is good enough to make safe? If you are thinking this way then you better learn some tips on how to take good care of your lappie, it’s not that easy to have one Optimizing your laptop would be the main thing here.

First thing to learn is how to extend the battery Life of your Laptop. If you are out in the road and have no outlet on sight, how would you extend the life of your battery?

1.        Dim the display.  The screen mostly draws the most power of the laptop battery.  So set the lowest setting to preserve the battery’s life.

2.       Exit or Close unnecessary process.  If you have a lot of process going on your laptop without any use, I suggest you should close it.  If you have DVD’s or CD’s on you DVD ROM you should eject the CD so that it will not keep on spinning and keep on consuming you laptops battery.  If the Anti-virus is kept on scanning your laptop, you should stop it.  There are other times to scan you laptop when you have the cable plugged in.

3.       Enable Power-saver profile.  For windows XP users, on your control panel you have the power options where you can set your computer’s resources sparingly as possible to save more power to your laptop’s battery.

4.       Re-calibrate battery’s gauge.  You should re-calibrate the battery gauge of your laptop in such a way that you should set a battery life for your laptop to shutdown or set it in a time that the battery is near discharge, in this way your laptop will not cut off the operation permanently because it thinks that the battery is depleted and needs to be recharged.

Second thing to learn is save your keyboard and screen. If you are out in the wifi zone and other places or even at home, there is a high possibility that you eat in front of your laptop (even I am doing it) and kids keep on playing that might damage the screen or keyboard.  Well we can solve the problem by putting some keyboard and screen protection.  In this way it will prevent foods and other debris from entering under the keyboard and scratches on the screen.  You can grab some of these at www.iskin.com, it’s a dual purpose a design and at the same time it’s a protection on your laptop.

So far we have we done quite enough on optimizing your laptop but there still are more ways to keep it from damages.  The third thing is keeping it cool; this is one thing that you should be concerned of because this is a problem that you should not have.  After using your laptop for hours it should be getting hotter, if you feel it then you should not put the laptop somewhere in your body such as your lap.  This can cause you a burn on the skin, the longer we use our laptops the more it gets hot.  There are preventive measures though and some of this is by using a lap desk or a laptop sleeve.  This will prevent the heat transfer when you have contact with the laptop.

Heat is also one of the most common causes of hardware failure.  The chips inside has certain working temperature if heat is too much it will malfunction.  But if your processor has the sensor and will automatically shut down when it reaches such temperature then it’s a big advantage for you.  But for me I keep my laptop cool because it’s usually on for more than 16 hours.  How do I keep it cool? Well I just bought a laptop cooler and a fan that would help the laptop from cooling down and it worked a lot for me.  Be careful and be aware of how your laptop gets so hot in time.

The fourth thing to learn is to be ready always to work offline, wifi zones are not always there to server us at times the wireless network can be down. So you should always be prepared on working offline like downloading your emails locally and by then you can read your mails offline.  How do you do this?  By using Mail User Agent (MUA), this allows you to download your mails on your computer and by then you can read your mails offline.  One good example of a mail user agent is the free software Thunderbird.  It does not only allow you to manage one SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) Server but it allows you to switch from one server to the other and send mails easily.  If you need to use secure SMTP? It’s no problem at all.  You can setup multiple SMTP servers and associate them with different email accounts.

The fifth thing to be concerned of is the security of your data.  If you are always on free wifi zones you always secure your data.  Make sure you have a firewall turned on and turn off folder sharing to keep others from peeking in your data.  Make sure also that the passwords on your laptop is strong and change it regularly.  This one great thing in optimizing your laptop, you can never be sure of the people connected on the network.

Sixth thing to be aware of is carry your laptop with care. Investing a bag made for laptops is the greatest thing to do.  In this way it will be kept safe form bumping on hard objects especially on walls or from people you meet along the subway.  Wrapping it with a shirt is not enough to keep it from getting shaken and bumped from hard objects.  This is one problem I had before when I was using an ordinary bag to bring my laptop anywhere.  I always have this white screen every now and then and it keeps bothering me every time I watch a movie.  I found out that the LCD was damaged and by that time I bought a new bag and get my LCD repaired (it’s very expensive).

Backing up is also one of the important things to do because portable computers deal mostly with wear and tear than desktops, which can cause a failure on the hard drive.  Make sure to backup your date regularly.  Laptops also are more prone to viruses especially when you are using Windows as your Operating System.  So that are some of the tips I can share you with regarding handling and optimizing your laptops.